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The Conservation of Fame	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 22392 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
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- 15
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Fourteen—The Conversation to End All Conversations
“Talk.”
Harry thought it was a bit rich for Draco to demand that, especially since he hadn’t even had a chance to taste his ice cream yet. He retaliated by swirling the ice cream around on his tongue, letting it melt and half-closing his eyes as he felt the chocolate run down his throat. The chocolate hadn’t been melted on top of the ice cream, but that hardly mattered. The sunlight coming through the windows was still strong enough to make it start to melt the minute they sat down at the table.
Or maybe that was the heat beating out from Draco, the heat of resentment and anger.
Harry lowered his spoon and looked at Draco. “You were the one who wanted this conversation,” he said, sweet as the vanilla ice cream that Draco had bought under protest and which sat congealing in front of him. “Why don’t you start?”
Draco reached across the table and caught his wrist. Harry allowed it, because it was his left hand, and that left his right hand free for both his spoon and the wand. “You have no idea what I wanted to do to you when I found out the truth,” Draco hissed.
“Yes, I do.” Harry cast a Privacy Charm around their table, just strong enough to make people look away in lack of interest, although he suspected many wouldn’t be looking their way anyway. Out here, he was no one any of them knew. But Draco’s hair, and then his face, might attract attention, and trouble. “You tried to kill me. I think I know pretty well.”
Draco blinked and didn’t crush Harry’s wrist the way he’d expected him to. “I did not mean to do that,” Draco murmured. “It was the first, instinctive reaction. It’s been my instinctive reaction since the war—destroy anyone who witnessed me in a moment of weakness.”
Harry smiled brightly at him and shook his head, clucking his tongue, and knew from Draco’s disgusted expression that he found that even more disgusting when Harry had a mouth full of ice cream. Tough. Harry had lost all sympathy for people who tried to kill him since those months of constant murder attempts. “Well, it’s nice to know which words of yours I can trust and which I can’t.”
“What do you mean?” Draco stared at him now with one muscle twitching above his eye. Harry wondered how many tics he could make him have before this conversation was all over.
“All that bollocks about how you would never hurt me,” Harry said, and licked the back of his spoon, tilting his head back again so that the ice cream would cascade to the bottom of his throat. “I know that’s not true. Because what did you do five minutes after saying it? Try to burn me alive.”
“I do find it rather strange that you would keep on harping on that,” Draco said, head half-lowering as though he thought he’d like to bite Harry. Harry tried to keep his face still and not remember the moments when Draco had. “It’s not as though you haven’t had people try to kill you before.”
Suddenly he let Harry go completely but leaned forwards, so near that Harry could feel Draco’s breath on his cheeks. “You fucker,” Draco said, low but deadly. “How do you think I felt, when I realized how much of my life was gone? All my rivalries in school, all the times I fought you, the debts I owed you, the times I thought about you since the war, reduced to a faceless Boy-Who-Lived who never existed—”
“You’re getting ice cream on your shirt,” Harry pointed out, nodding to where Draco’s chest had brushed the bowl of melting vanilla.
Draco’s eyes shone, and his hands clawed around the sides of the table as though he would rip it apart. “You have no idea what you meant to me,” he said. “And it all rushed back all at once, the enemy and the friend and the man I had slept with, the pleasure and the pain. I lashed out literally without meaning to, because those memories happened to be uppermost at the time and it was the only thing I could think of to do.”
Harry snorted quietly. He could actually accept that explanation, if he thought about it. The spell had broken for no one else, and so he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to suddenly have such a huge portion of your memory restored to you, the way it would flood your mind.
And few of the people who might break through the spell would have had as much to do with you as Draco did.
So, yeah, that much might be true. But that didn’t mean that he wanted to stay with someone who would try to kill him, or try to control him. Some of the people who had stalked him and broken into his home had honest grief or mental problems, too. They still belonged far away from him.
He looked up to find Draco hadn’t moved, even though by now he must be able to feel the ice cream soaking into his groin. “Tell me that you’ll give me time to think through this,” Draco said. It sounded like a demand and not the plea that he might have meant it to come out as, but then, Harry wasn’t convinced that Draco did pleas. “Tell me that you’ll talk to me, stay in my life.”
“I can’t promise that,” Harry said. “And it’s not even so much the hexes, you know, as the spell to turn me to stone.”
“Why that one?” Draco still stared at him, and Privacy Charm or not, a few people were starting to look their way. Harry grimaced. Draco looked as if he wanted to bite his face off or snog him in the middle of the restaurant.
But this was still the best place for a meeting. Malfoy Manor would give Draco too much advantage of home ground, and Harry was not inviting him back to his beloved home, not without more assurances than he had right now.
“Because other people wanted me under control,” Harry said, and didn’t become aware that his voice was shaking until he heard himself speak. Well, he had very little to hide from Draco now. He might as well know this, too. “I saw the cages some of them built in their cellars, Draco. I saw the boxes that someone intended to cut me up and put me in. Or the jars for my major organs, from someone who followed Egyptian beliefs. I can face danger. I collapsed vomiting from the backlash of breaking your wards when I got home, not because I was frightened. But to control me? You can fuck right off.”
He positioned the spoon like a weapon, and met Draco’s eyes, and tried to ignore the sound of his own panting.
Draco continued to stare at him. Then he sat back, with a little frown and a shake of his head.
“Why didn’t I ever know it was that bad?” he whispered.
“Because your memories are changed from being under the spell,” Harry said, although he blinked as he said it. Surely someone as smart as Draco was could figure that out. “And the Ministry never reported on some of the details that made them look bad. Or the papers didn’t. Either the Ministry cautioned them not to or they didn’t think they would make interesting stories, I never found out which.”
Draco continued to stare at him. “But there must have been something you could do. Someone must have wanted the money that you would pay to ensure your privacy.”
“I couldn’t offer as much money as the people who would pay for access to that information.” Harry shook his head. “The second year I was in Auror training, the security firm I’d paid to put up my wards sold the specifics, and someone nearly strangled me when I walked in my front door. After that, I handled everything.”
“I would have heard something,” Draco said. “And I was watching the papers. I remember that much. I paid attention to the Boy-Who—to you, it was you then. I would have heard stories like that.”
Harry snorted. “Well, it’s easier to walk away from you if you don’t believe me, that’s for certain. A lack of trust is something I’m not going to tolerate in someone I take to my bed.”
Draco flushed. “Tell me why I didn’t hear anything.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I just did. The Ministry was filled with people who didn’t like me, or didn’t think it was that bad, or were fans themselves. And I’m still an ordinary wizard, no matter how skilled and famous. I couldn’t guard against everything, and the only way that I could have made the paper stop writing about me involved methods that I wasn’t comfortable with.”
“But you were comfortable with mind control of the entire wizarding world?” Draco was staring at him with his face fixed.
Harry couldn’t help it; he started laughing. Draco reached out again as if he would capture and crush Harry’s wrist after all, but stopped. Harry leaned back in his chair and hooted, his throat aching and his eyes running with tears.
Draco continued to stare at Harry with his arms folded and his brows lowered until Harry thought he could fairly accuse him of pouting. Harry cleared his throat with a hiccough, and said, “You don’t care about the rest of the wizarding world, Draco. You’re pissed because of what I did to you. Not anyone else.”
Draco blinked, and then smiled faintly. “But it leaves the question of what you wouldn’t do to the newspapers.”
Harry shrugged. “I could have offered them an exclusive interview to back off for a while, but then they would have wanted another one, and another one. I could only make them give me a bit of privacy by becoming what they wanted me to become, which I wasn’t willing to do. So I fought back another way.”
“Will you continue to fight with me?”
Harry waited a moment, until he was sure that his laughter was entirely gone, and caught Draco’s eyes. “If you betray me and reveal the location of my home, or the existence of my spell, or anything else, I’ll hunt you down and destroy you.”
Draco winced and half-raised a hand. “I—didn’t mean it that way.”
Harry stared at him for a few minutes longer, and at last decided that Draco really meant it. He grunted and nodded, leaning back and beginning to eat his chocolate ice cream again. At least most people had gone back to their own meals now; they seemed to have decided that the situation couldn’t be serious if they weren’t about to see flying noses and snapping teeth. “Fine. And yes, I’ll fight with you if try to kill me or control me. Which is probably the best argument for you walking away right now. You can’t keep yourself from wanting those two things.”
Draco stared down at his own vanilla, and finally waved his wand to cast a Cleaning Charm. He cast Harry a keen glance, which meant he had noticed the way that Harry jumped when he drew his wand. Harry met his eyes and simply shrugged back. In an odd way, it was freeing that Draco now knew so much about him. Harry didn’t need to explain his reflexes the way he sometimes had to to the Muggles he’d dated.
“I was shocked,” Draco said quietly. “I was angry. To realize what you had been, who you’d been to me, and what you were now—” He shook his head. “Some of it was the memories’ sudden return, but some of it was that I couldn’t conceive of why you would have done it, except as some kind of grand joke on me. And I thought you might play that joke once I gave in and slept with you, even if you hadn’t intended it at first.”
“Gave in?” Harry repeated incredulously. “Who was telling who about fucking and the number of his bedrooms, here?”
Draco narrowed his eyes. “And now—I don’t like being vulnerable, Harry. I know that you took great steps to prevent yourself from being so to anyone who might possibly try to control you, so you ought to know what I mean. I lashed out, and I regret it now. I actually wanted to cast the spell to turn you into a statue so that I would have time to think about what to do next. I never meant it to be permanent.”
Harry fluttered his eyelashes at Draco. “I bet you say that to all the people you try to turn into stone.”
“Fuck you, then,” Draco snapped, but he didn’t stand or push his chair back from the table. “I’m trying to explain.”
Harry held his eyes and shrugged a little. “I want you,” he said. “I like you. I might even be more in love with you than anyone I’ve dated since I cast the spell. But I won’t be a sacrifice to your wounded pride. Yours, or anyone else’s.”
Draco cocked his head to the side. “I had thought that Gryffindors were willing to sacrifice everything for love,” he said.
Harry snorted. “I didn’t say it was love, just that it might be, or could become that. And yeah, sacrifice is not something that I want to do. I want privacy instead.”
Draco leaned further back in his chair. “And do you think that you can understand my point-of-view? That no matter how much you tried to tell me about the spell, or warn me, nothing could be adequate warning for—that?”
Harry cocked his head, and then sighed and rubbed his forehead, not because his scar hurt, but because he could feel a headache coming on. “Yes, I can see what you mean. But that doesn’t mean we belong together.”
“I can’t claim now that I would never hurt you,” Draco said quietly. “That was a stupid claim to make, in retrospect, given that I have hurt others I loved. But the rest of it remains true. I want you. I don’t intend to let you go without a fight. I enjoyed the night we spent together, and it is still incredible sex.” He stared at Harry again. “If I heard that you were with someone else, I would take it as a personal insult.”
Harry laughed. “And that a Slytherin declaration of love, is it?”
Draco smiled slightly, but his eyes had gone implacable. “I won’t answer that question until you answer mine. Are you with me, or against me?”
“It doesn’t have to work that way,” Harry pointed out. Bloody Slytherins, dividing the world up into two halves all the time. “We can just walk away from each other and ignore each other’s existences again. That would mean that you don’t have to be with me or against me. Just there.”
Draco looked at him, and Harry winced a little at the look in his eyes. “Yes, right, so that option’s out,” he muttered.
“With prejudice.” Draco leaned forwards. “And I don’t want to hear of you dating anyone else, either. I want to be with you.”
“So you can decide if you want to love me or kill me?” Harry shook his head. “I told you, I don’t want anyone who—”
“I would not seriously try to kill you.” Draco took up Harry’s hand and played with his fingers. “I didn’t mean the threats five seconds after you Apparated away. And you caused quite a bit of damage to the Manor with that stunt.”
“Good,” Harry said.
Draco smiled back at him, all his teeth bright and looking as if they had been newly filed that morning. “I want you,” he said, soft, savage, intense. “I want the man who defies me and the man who took my memory. I want the man you were, the one who conquered the Dark Lord, and the one you are now, who values his privacy. I look forward to making you surrender to me as completely as I did to you when you knew the truth and I didn’t.”
Harry felt the breath catch in his throat, and then stop for a moment. When Draco put it like that, when he looked at Harry with that gleam in his eyes, when his fingers tightened on Harry’s hand the way they were doing now—
And Harry remembered that words were words, and actions were something different altogether. He started breathing again.
“You haven’t forgiven me for the spell yet,” he said.
“No.” Draco was inflexible, watching. “But I want to know more. And that means I’ll soon know more about why the spell was cast, and how you did it, and what kind of person you are now, the parts I’m still missing.”
Harry couldn’t help snarling, in spite of thinking that some of what Draco was saying was reasonable. “I don’t want to be collected,” he said. “I’m not a collector’s item.”
Draco dipped his head, his eyes so intense that Harry wanted to shove his chair back and run away in turn. “I hope to find out ways of having you, wanting you, without making you feel that way,” he said quietly. He paused, then added, “And is there nothing that you want to know about me?”
Harry held Draco’s eyes for a long moment. Then he said, “Weeell…I am curious about how many bedrooms the Manor really has.”
Draco’s smile reached and burnished his eyes, and this time, when his grip closed down on Harry’s hand, it didn’t feel as imprisoning. And it did still leave Harry one hand free to eat his ice cream.

*

unneeded: Oh, Draco doesn’t intend to let Harry go, but Harry isn’t content to simply be passively collected, either.

LeaniaSTL: Thanks! Draco knows what he wants, but he hadn’t counted on the bad way that Harry tends to react to all attempts to get him to do things he doesn’t want to do. There’s no way that Draco can walk away, and no way Harry can sit back and passively wait for him to do whatever he wants to do.

SP777: I have written some scenes with Harry topping, just not for a while now. It depends on what feels right for the fic.
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The Conservation of Fame